


A Solstice Of Abundance: Scape and Craw, Scrape of Maw

by Varynova



Series: The Solstice Cycle [4]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Earth C (Homestuck), F/F, Not Epilogue Compliant, Post-Canon, Sadstuck, Suicidal Thoughts, Trans John Egbert, violence mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-19
Updated: 2019-08-19
Packaged: 2020-09-07 18:00:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20313682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Varynova/pseuds/Varynova
Summary: JUNE: wow, guys!  i think terezi hasn't been coping well since she got back!This is an old draft to chapter 6 ofA Solstice Of Abundance: Green Thumb, Blue Dice.  I'm uploading it in case anybody's interested.





	A Solstice Of Abundance: Scape and Craw, Scrape of Maw

**Author's Note:**

> With apologies to Thomas Bailey Aldrich.

The storm rages in the deepest reaches of your consciousness, again. A storm you haven't felt threatening to shred the boundaries of your mind in... an unfathomable period of time.

This unbearable paradise planet will be your death. That's what you thought from the moment you first arrived on Earth-C. Spending time there only strengthened that belief. You felt yourself slowly being gutted by the gorgeous skies, and gentle rains; the barkbeast play areas, and human meat cylinder vendors (meat, to your dismay, not OF humans but created BY humans) that populate its fields and cities. The human tradition of 'base ball', one only quarter-recalled in the conscious minds of the humans who formed this planet and all its hedonistic perfection, is more bizarre than you could imagine, great burly automatons swinging dildonic 'bats' at cannon-fired balls, rocketing them into space unerringly. Then some of the 'players' cheered, others bowed, some ran in little circles, and you felt your every sensory organ swim, not with the meat-sweats from the three cylinders you ate, but at the knowledge that this would be your forever.

Two weeks after you arrived in this monstrous valhalla you left, swearing to come back for only one thing. You return for supplies periodically, but if you don't find her you know you'll never return. It's telling that you don't make a contingency plan for if you do.

Because she has the luxury of forever, and you? Intractable Terezi, you will die one day.  
No, you're not old. By some stroke of almost too-engineered fate, you are the same age as every other founder of this sun-bright, singsong hellscape. You resigned yourself to this end sweeps ago, when all your friends but Karkat flamed out or ascended, leaving you two with the awareness that you would grow decrepit and die, warriors sunset by some Ultimate Victory.

And before that, before you even understood the stakes of Sgrub's metaphoric cycles of rebirth and creation, you had fared well with the knowledge that you would die very young indeed. You coped well, you thought, with a culture of ghoulish and ritualistic killings. You took part, where you had to, in the worst of it, Legislaceration: a grisly process of dismemberment, psychic torture, and the system's unshakeable appetite for the corpses of the unworthy. All for the quaint puppetry of justice.  
Until, suddenly, it ended. An unbelievable whiplash of instantaneous compassion. And the mechanism of its demise heralded a long and peaceful life ahead of you.  
But how quickly can a mind adjust to a sudden existence filled only with ice cream cones, walks through parks, 'base ball'?

It would have taken your whole life just to settle into it, become complacent. And when you left that new life behind you were terrified with how quickly your body acclimated to your new, grim task of searching an infinite, endless nothingness, so yawning that it could not even be called 'space' or 'the universe', but some non-place between all things, unplottable, inconstant, groaning.

Maybe your newfound comfort is because every time you let your attention drift from the sensations of steering through the nothingness, you feel the cracks again-- not from this reality, but from another one, where you put your arm around Vriska and together your ghosts breathed in the void as you experienced true obliteration.

You sought for her for what felt like sweeps-- became sweeps-- because she was your one reason to even be, any longer, and that made the search your reason.

You didn't speak to another being for a 'year'. You just flew, in jagged lines, close-- you were sure-- to simply picking a direction and continuing until you... ran out of fuel? Disgorged your inventory of compacted, high-nutrition ur-foods into a nearby sun in a willing attempt to end this futility? Simply let yourself drift into one during a listless and fitful rest?

Even now, sitting in your bare-walled respiteblock, you shudder to imagine. And you don't stop shaking, because of what happened next as you contemplated ending it.

Your phone pinged. Egbert's color stank up the pesterpanel, and you gave it a solid sniff to try to fathom what meaning it could hold, why anyone would attempt to contact a husk like you, hurtling cometlike to her eventual sputtering demise.

Fool that she is, she wrote seven simple words.  
EB: she showed up here!!!  
EB: come on back!

You felt the hollow numbness in your core that had dominated your being since Vriska left, as though it were freshly-torn and raw now for the first time. Perhaps those wasted sweeps could be redeemed, if, when you saw her, you could just...

And instead, like an uncaged, feral thing, robbed of speech and faculties, you lashed out, launched your entire body against hers, and bit and gnawed until you were scared she would die. Maybe you even hoped she would, so you'd have a good reason to, too.

The last Alternian sits alone in her respiteblock.  
There is a knock on the door.


End file.
